Thank you for visiting our forum. As a guest, you have limited access to view some discussion and articles. By joining our free community, you will be able to view all discussions and articles, post your own topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload photos, participate in Pick'Em contests and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today!!

You've got to hand it to Crystal Castles. It's not easy to be relentlessly macabre and unapologetically bleak while at the same time making people want to get up and dance. But when Alice Glass, the Canadian duo's goth-eyed frontwoman, glowers with punk ferocity across producer Ethan Kath's hard-driving beats, the only reasonable thing to do seems to be to follow them to hell and back; it's rave music in every sense of the word.

One of the band's trademarks is its spooky album-coverage imagery—an illustration of Madonna's bruised, bloody faced glared out from the cover of their first EP; a possessed little boy lurches across a graveyard on the cover of II. But the occultish, phosphorescent image of a shrouded figure cradling a man's body on the cover of this third album, (III), moves beyond haunting for its own sake: It's actually a stylized photo of a Yemeni woman holding her son, a protester who's been tear-gassed. Glass has said that "oppression" is a major theme of (III), explaining vaguely that "I didn't think I could lose faith in humanity any more than I already had, but after witnessing some things, it feels like the world is a dystopia where victims don't get justice and corruption prevails.” (She's somewhat more forthcoming in a cryptic email interview with Pitchfork, reciting a litany of statistics detailing various forms of gender oppression.)